Trails Alliance of Santa Fe

Caring for the Trails of Santa Fe

We’re the Trails Alliance of Santa Fe — a volunteer arm of the Santa Fe Conservation Trust working in cooperation with public land managers to help plan, build, and maintain non-motorized trails in the Santa Fe area.

We strive to provide a fun and engaging program to educate, train, and manage volunteers to restore, maintain, and promote quality, safe, and sustainable trails to benefit the community and its visitors.

Alliance partners include the Santa Fe County Open Space and Trails Division, the City of Santa Fe, the non-profit Commonweal Conservancy, the Santa Fe Fat Tire Society, the non-profit Santa Fe Conservation Trust and Extra Space Storage for providing a place to store out tools.

Latest News!

Friends of the Forest Program – The Santa Fe National Forest experienced five major wildfires in the past 2 years with one last summer becoming the largest fire in New Mexico history. During the aftermath of these events, many members of the public offered to help rehabilitate the trails and forested areas. In response to this interest, the Santa Fe National Forest would like to encourage us to start a non-profit “Friends” group for the continued benefit of the National Forest’s trail, heritage, wildlife, land and water resources. Many other Friends of the Forest groups have been established and their accomplishments have significantly benefited our public lands.

If you enjoy the Santa Fe National Forest and would to get involved with this opportunity, please attend a meeting on January 17th from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Santa Fe REI’s Community Room. Jennifer Sublett, Volunteer coordinator for the Espanola and Pecos-Las Vegas Ranger Districts and Kerry Helke, a Forest volunteer, will present further research on the benefits of starting and supporting a friends group for the Santa Fe National Forest. Details will also be provided regarding the steps for making a non-profit friends group a reality.
If you would like to attend please contact Jennifer at jasublett@fs.fed.us or Kerry at kerry.peavey@gmail.com. If you are unable to attend the meeting but would like to get involved, call Jennifer at 505-753-7331 for more information.

Santa Fe National Forest Crew Leader Training – If you are interested is training to become a crew leader for projects on local trails and in the National Forest here’s your chance. Jennifer Sublett will be hosting a informational meeting for those interested in crew leader training on Saturday, January 28th from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m. at the Santa Fe National Forest Supervisor’s office, click here for office location information. For more information about the training contact Jennifer via email at jasublett@fs.fed.us or call 505-753-7331.

History will have to wait! Because of unforeseen problems, the work on the new La Piedra Trail has been postponed until January, 2012.

How often do you get a shot at building a new trail? The Santa Fe Conservation Trust needs your help in building The La Piedra Trail which will connect Dale Ball Trail North with the Little Tesuque Creek Trail and thereby link Santa Fe’s urban “wilderness” trails with the Santa Fe National Forest. (For more information and a better map, go to the Trust’s website: www.sfct.org/trails.)

In conjunction with the Trust, the Trails Alliance of Santa Fe (TAOSF) is organizing four workdays over two weekends – December 3rd & 4th and December 17th & 18th. All sessions will be held from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Meet at the Sierra del Norte parking corral of the Dale Ball Trails (off Hyde Park Road). Bring water, lunch, work gloves and work boots. All tools will be provided. Check our events calendar if the weather looks questionable on a workday.

October 16, 2011
The weather was perfect for the 5 hearty souls that showed up for this Winsor trail workday. We worked the Winsor below Pacheco Canyon Rd for about a mile. Margaret Alexander, Bob Ward, Dan Knobelnoch & Joe Abbatacola led the charge as we removed a few trees across the trail, removed a few roots and debermed the trail for better water drainage. Amazingly we encountered no hikers but plenty of bike riders most of which were heading up hill! Mike Chapman, one of the bikers we met took this picture of us as he was heading up the Winsor on his single speed 29er, the worst part was that Mike was hardly sweating! If weather permits we’ll probably have one more work project on the Winsor this fall.

October 1, 2011

A few of our National Public Lands Day volunteers.

Our National Public Lands Day event was a big success!
Thanks to all 21 people that helped give the Dale Ball Trails a fall sprucing up and thanks to REI for giving all the volunteers a “wicking” good shirt, water bottle and trail grub. We worked on the North and Central sections of the trail and really got a lot done. Thanks also to the many volunteers from the Santa Fe Fat Tire Society that showed up. Cath Washburn was kind enough to touch up the signs outside the parking area pointing to the parking lot. The signs were sooo faded you couldn’t even make out what they were for.

“Trails Don’t Just Happen”

National Public Lands Day – Saturday, September 24th
Dale Ball Trail Head – Sierra del Norte parking lot
9am – education session
9:45am – trail service project

Trails update 8/13/2011:
The summer monsoons bring with them a chance to get back into the mountains and work on trails. The Forest Service doesn’t allow work in the burned areas because of the danger from falling trees and rocks, but work on the Winsor Trail and Dale Ball trails has resumed.

Today’s project on the Winsor Trail brought a surprise: Joel Rowland, a geomorphologist, gave us his expertise. Geomorphology is the “study of landforms and the processes that shape them” according to Wikipedia–is there a more perfect match to what trail building and maintenance really needs? Joel eyed each work site from the vantage of a golfer on a putting green, figuring out exactly where rainfall will erode the trail. Needless to say, it was some of our best work. Thanks again to todays volunteers: Dan Gresham (photographer), Vint Miller, Joel Rowland, Margaret Alexander & Steve Washburn

A big thanks to Bruce Hamby from the Fat Tire Society for shapening all out tools!

Give a Darn – Give a Ding – Our bell give away has been a huge success! We had funds to buy 300 bells and have given them all out. The bells had the Trails Alliance web address on them and the hope was to help reduce the startle factor of bikers approaching hikers on the trails. The bell came with a card that has basic trail etiquette guidelines and information on the Trails Alliance. If you would like to make a donation so we can buy more bells please contact us.

The Santa Fe Botanical Garden is collaborating with the Trails Alliance and the City of Santa Fe to build a trail to Museum Hill, beginning at Old Pecos Trail and leading into the proposed garden. The Trails Alliance will lead the effort to build the natural surface portion of the trail.

While our tools may need sharpening, they are safely and luxuriously stored in a unit donated to us by Extra Space Storage at the corner of Pacheco and West San Mateo. We appreciate their very important contribution to trails in Santa Fe.

  • National Trails Day – Luckily we got a lot of work done on the Norski area portion of the Winsor Trail on National Trails Day, June 4. Twenty-two workers, ranging from a six year old to a grandfather took part. The trail is in much better shape now. One sharp volunteer found a bed of alpine orchids for us to admire.
  • La Tierra Trails – It was a huge success. Nearly 40 trail-builders took a Saturday afternoon to build a brand new connector trail (#10) in the La Tierra Trail system. They were led by two crew leaders from the IMBA/Subaru team. A swooping, perfectly turned trail now is a bridge between two major trails, adding more fun for mountain bike riders. The Santa Fe Fat Tire Society turned out lots of workers, but, really, volunteers from all walks of life participated.

  • Upper Winsor Maintenance – On April 23rd we teamed up with Fat Tire Society and several other volunteers (a total crew of 23) and worked with Jennifer Sublett (Forest Service) to “fix” portions of the Winsor above the Pacheco Canyon Road. We got a tremendous amount of work done and had fun to boot! A special thanks to Santa Fe Mountain Sports for providing swag for everyone that participated and to WTB/REI for a mtb tire. This is the first of many projects we will do with the bike club on the Winsor between the Ski Area and the Borrego trail this season.

Join Us and Get Involved!

It’s easy to become a supporter of the Trails Alliance of Santa Fe.

The Trails Alliance of Santa Fe wishes to thank Charles Fox of Avian Design
for his support and help designing and maintaining this website.